I agree with this assessment. First of all, the distro doesn't matter much, because you can get almost any desktop environment for almost any distro. I doubt t

I agree with this assessment. First of all, the distro doesn't matter much, because you can get almost any desktop environment for almost any distro. I doubt there's much difference, in terms of resource usage, between Mint with Cinnamon or Xfce vs. Ubuntu Cinnamon or Xubuntu. Second, all of the major Linux desktop environments use about 1 GB of memory after booting up, before launching any applications. Historically, maybe it was true that Xfce was much more lightweight than GNOME, for example, but it looks like a pretty level playing field these days. And that's probably because, in the end, you're mostly going to run Firefox or Chrome to run a bunch of modern, heavyweight web apps. Even if you just use a window manager without a full desktop environment, I don't think you can move the needle much. You still need to be able to run a modern, heavyweight browser. Third, even Windows 10 runs fine on 8 GB of memory. My wife's laptop does it all day, no problem.